Right before I turned 7 years old, my parents divorced, and my mother and I moved into a new apartment in a neighboring community. It was in an older building, built in 1927. So, I assume there must have been a lot of previous tenants who lived in the building. Within a few weeks of moving in, my mother mentioned she could hear breathing in her ear at night as she was trying to fall asleep. I told her she was just hearing my breathing. She did not think so, as we slept in separate bedrooms. This went on for several weeks when she came up with an idea. When I went for a weekend visit with my father, she was in the apartment alone, and she could hear the breathing in her ear again. So, she held her breath, trying to eliminate herself as the source of the sound. She could still hear the breathing! The walls that separated our apartment from the apartment next door were very thick, so she knows it was not the neighbor she could hear breathing.

I still thought she was mistaken, until a few months later, when I began to hear the sounds of footsteps in the apartment late at night. I thought several times that my mother must have gotten up in the middle of the night to do something and that it was her footsteps I was hearing. So, I asked her about it one morning, and she said she does not walk around the apartment in the middle of the night. I was sure she was the source of the sound, until one night when the footsteps were really loud, and I went into her bedroom and found her in a deep sleep. Nobody else was in the apartment. At this point, I knew someone else was there with us. We lived in that apartment for 19 years before finally moving out of Ohio entirely. And over those years, the footsteps were increased, as eventually, I could hear what sounded like several people walking around the apartment, rather than just one. The footstep sounds eventually found their way into my bedroom. I had a bathroom connected to my bedroom, and I kept the door closed to the bathroom, because of things that were going on in there at night that was scaring me. So, I usually kept my bookbag for school slung over the bathroom door knock, and a few times, I could hear what sounded like someone looking through my book bag. When I told my mother about this, she told me that the spirits were checking to make sure I did my homework!